IT used to be if you wanted to understand the world from another’s perspective, you had to walk in their shoes. Now you can just peep through their smartphone.

MIT Media Lab’s Playful Systems research group has announced a project to connect people that is either clever or creepy, depending on how you view the practice of anonymous stalking.

The project is called 20 Day Stranger and it will work in through an iPhone app that will be launched in the next few months.

Think of the sort of things that people already share about themselves on social media.

One bloke I follow on Twitter logs into Foursquare to announce whenever he’s at a train station. Another bloke tweets how many steps he walks each day, according to his Fitbit activity tracker. A third starts the day with the same annoyingly irrelevant update: “I’m awake, world. Slept for 6h 44m with 39.13 per cent deep sleep.”

Frankly, I don’t care where Tweep A toot toots, how Tweep B tip toes or whether Tweep C tosses and turns all night when he tucks himself in.

But maybe I would care more if I didn’t have a face (well, a social media avatar) to put to the owner of the over sharing.

The idea of the project is that those who take part are paired up with someone around the world. Each won’t know anything about the other and will not be able to communicate, aside from the chance to send one message at the end of the 20 days.

And what do you get to see during your 20 days of sharing? The works, or at least all that your smartphone can share.

An example is that if you jump in a taxi, your connected stranger will see the Google streetview of the buildings along your journey.

The researchers have teamed up with Google, Foursquare and Instagram, so you can imagine that images will be very much part of the experience. They go to lunch at spot X and suddenly you’re overwhelmed with food porn photography of people who eat at that particular spot.

When you get to the end of the 20 days, and have the chance to send your special stranger a single message, what would you say? Thanks for sharing. Your life is more boring than mine. I wish I was more like you.

It is a little bit like the Hitchcock movie Rear Window, where a photographer with a dodgy leg finds out all sorts of things about his neighbours by looking through their windows and into their lives. Although presumably the similarity stops short of the part where Jimmy Stewart discovers one of his neighbours is a murderer.

You want your 20 days with a stranger to be all about seeing interesting places, watching interesting activities. It’s a pity when you sign up to the app you can put in a request like those cleverly worded dating adds in the back of some literary magazines. Bored middle-aged bloke wants to perve on someone’s very interesting life. Weirdos need not apply (except for us).

While not everyone wants someone to virtually follow them for 20 days, the fact that you have to opt in to the system reduces the complaint that it’s an invasion of privacy.

And, while the partnering of two strangers is a new twist, having the ability to follow someone is no longer novel.

If you own an iPhone, you can select friends who can find your location at any time.

If you’re a bloke in touch with his feminine side who wants to keep your Offspring obsession a secret from your mates, this is one feature you want to turn off.

When I go out for a run, I tell my phone to tap into the GPS info on my watch so the two can email my wife my route in real time. That way, if I have a medical mishap brought on by too much mid-life-crisis-induced exercise, at least she knows where to find the body.

Maybe sharing through 20 Day Strangers will help people understand the plight of others.

In a world where we already know too much about people we hardly know, maybe learning more things about people we don’t know at all can help put everything else into perspective.

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